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Automatic Gain Control or Volume Control

I have stored over 500 songs on the hard drive in my 2012 Volt. What I find really frustrating is that I am continuously adjusting the volume control to get the same volume level from songs from different artists. An automatic gain control such as commonly found with home theater systems to keep the volume level the same between regular programming and what is used for commercials would be a big help..

I have stored over 500 songs on the hard drive in my 2012 Volt. What I find really frustrating is that I am continuously adjusting the volume control to get the same volume level from songs from different artists. An automatic gain control such as commonly found with home theater systems to keep the volume level the same between regular programming and what is used for commercials would be a big help..

In the config->radio there is an "automatic volume" level, though I thought it was just for adjsuting it for road noise.

MP3gain as mentioned in the article Pete linked to will change the mp3 files (just a volume adjustment in the header), will definitely work on all devices including Volt and any Apple devices. Highly recommended. Changes made via iTunes only work in iTunes & iPod/iPad, I think they are using a tag only read by Apple devices.

The Volt's "automatic" volume control settings just make the stereo play louder as you drive faster. The Volt's automatic setting does nothing to normalize the volume of songs stored on the HD or USB devices.

You point out a basic issue with listening to music in a car. Cars are noisy places. (Even the Volt.) I agree that some sort of audio compression setting would be useful. Radio stations have used audio compressors since the 1940's to maintain even volume on the air. (Compression is the same trick that audio engineers use to make commercials sound louder than everything else.) I think that an audio compressor setting would be very useful on a car stereo... Yet I have never seen a car stereo that offered compression settings.

iTunes does have a "Normalize" feature which analyzes all of the songs in your library and attempts to adjust the volume of each song to a normalized volume. Unfortunately... It has some drawbacks. In order to normalize the songs recorded with low volume iTunes will turn down all the rest of your music a bit to match the low volume songs. iTunes turns the soft songs up slightly and it turns the loud music down slightly. It seems to keep everything at about 80% of full volume. This means MANY songs will suffer slightly in sound quality. I have definitely noticed sound quality issues with the iTunes "soundcheck" option enabled. (Some songs play with added hiss... Some even distort slightly.) But in a car... I suppose soundcheck would be helpful. But even the iTunes "shoundcheck" will not help songs with a lot of dynamics. (Soft passages mixes with loud parts.) An audio compressor would be very helpful in a car.